Kansas City Kansas & Kansas City Missouri has a population of 2.5+M, a largish & impressive array of corporate head and sattelite offices; a now 4 year old stunningly beautiful state of the art arena in its downtown core and arena managers who know what their doing. The citys ranked 6 or 7 as "Best Place to Live" in America; has an excellent LRT system, great demographics.
It was around 2 million in the 2010 census, #29 in the list of U.S. metropolitan areas. Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, Orlando and Seattle are bigger metros without NHL teams. Las Vegas, Charlotte, Indianapolis, Austin and Norfolk/Va. Beach are within a few places.
And I don't know where you got that "Best Place To Live" ranking from, I'm not saying you make it up, but there's like 500 different lists like that out there and it means absolutely nothing.
I wouldn't ever underestimate the chance of KC getting a team, simply because they are willing and have an arena, but the reality is that KC is no Atlanta or even a Phoenix in terms of being part of a push into the U.S. mainstream. Both existing KC franchises exist in a bit of a shadowy place in their respective leagues and the area has a pretty big image problem.